


unique principles of self-restraint and harmony

by transversely



Category: Ookiku Furikabutte | Big Windup!
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-06
Updated: 2014-05-06
Packaged: 2018-01-23 17:51:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1574348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transversely/pseuds/transversely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In theory, Momokan knew there was technically nothing about legacy schools that should be intimidating off the field, but the optimistic rush brought on by repetition of this fact was difficult to maintain when you did things like snag a purple kleenex from a dispenser to fix your makeup and read, blurred by bronzer, something like “Did you know that the 1997 fall season Municipal offense lineup was photographed in Love Berry’s photo spread of Japan’s most beautiful people?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	unique principles of self-restraint and harmony

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kuruk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuruk/gifts).



> dear Kuruk, you will see about two paragraphs in why this was so difficult for me to write, but i had a lot of fun in the zany, madcap process of doing so and hope a little of that will transfer over to you in the reading too. as always, i (and you!) should give heartfelt thanks to the usual suspects tumblr users kasukabes and khepria for listening to me rend my garments about this fic, providing several key ideas, and altogether making it possible.
> 
> this fic contains complete manga spoilers up to but not including the Senda game, particularly the story of Momokan's Nishiura experiences and the tragedy of her teammate, detailed in chapter 85. last but not least, thanks, of course, to you as well, for unknowingly helping me write it ;) 
> 
> enjoy--and here's to the start of an Oofuri summer!

 

 

 

 

 

Actually, Momokan had heard it from Shinooka that out of all the school uniforms she and her middle school friends had tried on, the Kasukabe uniform was her favorite for its particular shameless brand of kitschy, mass-manufactured confidence. She liked the godawful borderline vinyl bow and the vintage button that anchored it in place (passed down by club she said—the baseball club always got the school’s signature purple), and the grey tights with their violet tweeding you wouldn’t notice unless you stood in the right light. She liked blowing her hair out around her temples so it flared above the sailor cowl. The collar from the spare one she had was a little small and hugged the base of her throat like a statement necklace, and she’d confessed to Momokan a little shyly that eventually she’d unpinned it and started wearing it like that, snug under her tracksuit and over her undershirt.

They’d both laughed then: there was something about the idea that at that historied place it’d had only one form and function, but at Nishiura its history didn’t mean anything in particular. Shinooka had chosen it herself, after all. At Nishiura it could be anything.

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

“Okay, so, don’t—crash the bike or anything,” said Abe, which was the best possible way to ensure that Momokan would drive it straight into one of the appallingly tasteless purple-dyed shrubs that said SUZUKI AOI on its bronze nameplate, either because this individual had donated it or the plant had actually been christened in his name, both of which were equally repulsive possibilities. She cursed amiably and rescued her dress; Abe dived for the box of data and snatched up his notebooks in record time, as though a passing senior citizen might have gone for it karuta-style and stolen half a year’s worth of labyrinthine batting charts. Then again, this was Kasukabe, so this could easily have happened. Would probably happen, by the end of the evening. You really could never tell with legacy schools—well, this was why Momokan encouraged her boys to carry mace!

“I _said_ —“

“I know, I did it just to spite you,” said Momokan cheerily, and ruffled his hair. He looked relieved; the gel had looked a bit like he’d had his catchers’ helmet shrink-wrapped to his cranium. “What was I not supposed to be crashing for, anyway, did you forget cologne?”

“Shiseido does free samples in the Kasukabe restrooms, I looked it up,” he said absently, taking her dead seriously as ever, and shifted the box of notebooks protectively in his arms. Not for the first time, she wondered if she should have installed a child safety seat on the bike. “Anyway, I thought you should know that no one on the team is speaking to me after—the Musashino game. Those last few pitches—”

“Oh, that’s an exaggeration. Come on, is that all? Shinooka and I _saw_ Tajima—“

“He was lodging a _complaint_ about my strategy.”

“A _complaint_.” It was one way to put it. He’d lodged it all the way home, yelling on the bus to anyone who would listen, and according to Hanai, in the boys’ locker rooms afterwards as well. Said complaint was well and truly lodged. “Well, what about Izumi?”

“It was because we were having gyoza for—“

“Nishihiro? Aren’t you two good friends now?”

“Last week, he asked me if I’d seen Akira. _Akira!_ What does he think I _am_ , of course I downloaded that the first time he mentioned it in—Momokan, it’s just an insult! You can’t call that _speaking_ —“

“Mihashi?”

“I spoke to him, he didn’t speak to _me_ ,” scowled Abe, and if they hadn’t been late to the recruitment fair and in danger of abandoning poor Shinooka to the vagaries of shark-infested legacy school social politics, Momokan would have found some way to be more effusive about this hitherto unsuspected ability to make the distinction. As it was, she grabbed his elbow and traded him the box of data for her bike helmet, watching him cradle the thing with affected menace, the same way he sulked over his batting helmet as though the concept of offense lived up to its name by slighting him personally.  

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about right now,” she said. “We’re here to recruit a new catcher for you, isn’t this usually something you’d love? Hanai-kun couldn’t be here, so—do a vice-captain’s duty!”

“Tajima,” said Abe. “What about Tajima?”

She looked back at him, the fretful and confused face somehow even more fretful and confused in the light of the arclights that wreathed the front of Kasukabe Municipal High School. Abe had needlessly tired eyes. Even at camp after Bijou, when they’d all been following the same sleeping and eating pattern and drinking dozens of bottles of water, his eyes had stayed that way, sunken and harrowed, thoughtful though he wasn't focusing on anything. It reminded her of her first failed semester of nursing school, considering her thermos of coffee as the nauseous dawn light crept in around her drawn blinds, her unfinished diagrams. She understood a little: you got the feeling back in miniature, every time your team fell behind a few innings in or the budget columns didn’t quite come out right to replace that one broken bat, that one necessary fielders’ glove. Once something unexpected had happened it changed you; you didn’t just—stop being tired because things had worked out the once.

“I didn’t ask Tajima, I asked you,” she said. “Come on, Abe-kun. Let’s not keep Shinooka waiting.”

 

 

 

 

 ~

 

 

 

 

The manager for the first professional baseball team in Japan had been a scant twenty-six years old when he designed Ichiko First the infamous training regimen that had trounced the Americans on foreign soil for the first time, and he’d had a woman’s name. Actually, Momokan had believed Chuman Kanae _was_ a woman until she stumbled across a picture in a motivational pamphlet that’d been included in her Shonen Jump when she was fourteen, and then she’d been startled at the bearded, visibly angry young man who’d glared out at her from the pages of the brochure, lending a seething sincerity to the boilerplate text encouraging students to study harder, eat better, sleep less. _High school baseball is an art of peace and steadiness,_ stated the brochure, _a remarkable team functions on the most unique principles of self-restraint and harmony._ The rueful disappointment didn’t stop her from dialing the number on the back of the pamphlet and asking for a few more, she could use them, definitely: yes, she had a formal reason. She was the manager for a high school baseball team (soon-to-be-remarkable).

Technically she’d been doing recruitment since she was old enough to understand what it was, so considered in that light it was remarkable that she hadn’t exactly managed to improve her track record any—or viewed from another standpoint, it was remarkable that with that _kind_ of track record she’d managed to stay afloat at all. She had a good memory for these things, anyway.  They’d come in rows six deep in a packing box right away—she guessed, now that she was older, the company probably hadn’t had many requests. Most teams had their alumni to motivate students, or Koshien records. They didn’t need to resort to ancient history.

Recruitment day then had come and gone in a flutter of rain and ominous echoes of wintertime fog; at the end of the day, the team was still two members. Seven years previously, clubs including women on their rosters had been banned from playing at Koshien and if they’d had more members, perhaps she wouldn’t have registered herself as an official member of the baseball club at all, but the list had looked so awful with only the one name. Some of the brochures had gotten trampled underfoot from the crush of people barreling in and out of the auditorium, and Momokan, who couldn’t reliably say what the color of the carpet of her own cluttered floor at home was, had scooped up each one that she could find, pressing out the folds and wiping footprints away with a wet tissue.

She put them back on the recruitment desk. Someone, somewhere—might want to join. You never knew. When the time came, wasn’t it better to be prepared?

The Intrepid Mountaineer had laughed at her when he’d come back to the table. He’d been at the wilderness club’s booth half the day anyway and had no right to talk. That was when she’d taken to calling him that, playful and a little accusatory, because it was easier to make his childish fixation with the outdoors sound preposterous than to persuade him that it could be just as easily satisfied on a baseball field, like they’d planned.

(“My dear Maria! Too many pamphlets! Are we going to run a baseball club or a baseball _school_!”

“Thinking small, aren't you? A baseball city! A baseball _kingdom_!”

“On a mountaintop—“)

There among the jostling and mingling of all the clubs they’d bent over the recruitment sheet with their two names on it and frivolously allowed themselves to fill in the positions they wanted. She took leadoff and first base and pitcher, and wrote in catcher too, until he’d pointed out it was impossible—impossible! as though _that_ were the least of their concerns!—and they’d laughed, forgotten about their unexplored mountains and pristine green infields, divided up the rest with the whirlwind urgency they’d have mustered up for their best welcome talk, if they’d had the opportunity to give one. She’d kept one of the brochures pressed between the pages of each of her textbooks for weeks afterward. That was fine too—when you had less people, there was just that much more of what was good to go around for each of you.   

That day had come and gone. Uneventful in a string of them through the gauntlet of high school. The rain battering the copper auditorium roof, the sluice of water and springtime dirt tracked in on shoes and discarded umbrellas. The low impressed whistle of the Intrepid Mountaineer as he signed his name next to cleanup, which had made her punch him in one of the arms that would never hit a homerun. Her own handwriting: _Momoe Maria: pitcher, manager_. She’d have to learn a good breaking ball, arrange for times and places to practice throwing it on the diagonal, to each of the corners at the edge of the strikezone. _To climb a mountain or a hill, the first step is the same_ , singsonged the Intrepid Mountaineer in her ear, and she would have rolled her eyes but it was in the Chuman pamphlet too, a happily encouraging coincidence. It was all clear in front of her, split into quartered and quadranted manageable tasks the way her screwball kissed the edges of the invisible strikezone. Momoe Maria: pitcher, manager. That day, it hadn’t looked impossible.

 

 

 

 

 ~

 

 

 

 

 

“What distinguishes Kasukabe Municipal High School’s baseball program? As former captain, I’d say the difference comes down to one thing: our unique personal element. Here at our humble municipal high school, established 1934, we combine a top-quality baseball education with an understanding of the synergy between each player and his position that can only be called spiritual—excuse me, I’m emotionally moved—“

It had looped for the third time in a row and Momokan still had no idea what the promotional video was actually trying to _say_ , nor why the tablet had been bolted so securely to their table that upon rigorous application of her hands, a screwdriver, and after instructing Abe to stand in front of her, her high heel, she still couldn’t dislodge it nor get the damn volume down. The display Shinooka had made for their table involved a remote-control helicopter Abe had wheedled out of the enterprising hands of Nishihiro’s little sister, forlornly trailing a hand-painted Nishiura flag; she’d resorted to hoping that if this buzzed around assiduously enough for the entire evening it would drown out the sound of Shiba Yuuki’s glib voice asserting for the nth time that the ominous 'personal element' of Kasukabe Municipal High School’s baseball program was somehow what guaranteed its ability to throw scads of cash at the prefectural recruitment fair for the third year in a row and not, say, an alumni network more obsequious than a Diet intern at a parliamentary brunch. She chipped her heel on the fourth try and swore out loud; thankfully a pair of disembodied hands snaked around her and keyed in a password, blanking the screen out to a comparatively inoffensive slidehow of purple-clad baseball players performing community service.

“Ah—Shinooka-chan! You _saved_ us!”

“The password is ‘closet!’ That nice ace from Sakitama, he told me that their captain once—anyway, you’re _here_! Thank goodness…Abe-kun, there’s a photocopier over there—not the purple one, that’s only for a few schools—use the grey one behind it if you want to copy charts. I highlighted Tajima-kun’s batting averages and those great strikeouts you battery guys had during the called game! Those would be fun for people to see…”

“Just make sure you don’t give one to the nice ace from Sakitama, in that case,” said Momokan, and Shinooka flushed. Abe ignored them both flagrantly in favor of picking at the tablecloth, which wasn’t a real tablecloth but an oendan banner Shinooka had repurposed and  weighted down at the edges with clementines—not quite up to par with the diamond-emblazoned blue boxes of sweets Tosei seemed to be giving out, but at least the right _color._

“Only three teams in the entire prefecture played a called game during this tournament,” he said suddenly, apropos of nothing but a feeble indicator that he had at least been listening to the conversation, which was in theory encouraging. “It’s important to give out the stats from that game. That’s commendable foresight,” he addressed the air over Shinooka’s shoulder. Momokan sideswiped him in the ankle with her chipped heel and he added, “…Shinooka.”

“I didn’t know it was only three!”

“It was us, this purple…whatever, and—“ Abe took a deep breath, “A—“ breath “R—“ breath “—C.”

He was making the kind of face most people reserved for groundbreaking mathematical proofs or high-definition photographs of galaxies. Behind him a clementine rolled off the table, punctuating this statement; he scooped it up without dislodging the evangelical expression and began shredding its peel rapturously. Shinooka winced and kicked the scraps under the tablecloth.

“Yoshida-kun is a great catcher,” said Momokan, uninflected.

“The _greatest_. He has _four_ pitchers. He takes _two_ seconds to issue signs if his pitcher shakes one off. He has _six_ kindsof medicated ointment in his battery first-aid kit, he left it on the bench, and just as I planned, my binoculars could—anyway. He _—_ “

“He sends five texts a day to Kasukabe’s power hitters. They’re middle school friends. I’m sure they’re both here, too, you should be certain to say hello.”

Abe peered at her suspiciously. “ _Interesting._ Did that—have something to do with the called game, do you think?”

“Abe-kun, of course not. I just—heard about it through the grapevine.”

“What grapevine!? Is it a coaches’ discussion forum?” His expression suddenly went wheedling and his knees knocked together in a horrific imitation of demureness. “You know…some coaches…they share their login information with…their students…to help them make decisions that are beneficial to the future of the team. And for like, _teamwork_ or something. It’s a sign of _trust_. Actually.”

“Or something.”

“Yeah, definitely!” A couple of middle schoolers went by, festooned with colorful streamers; Abe launched a slow smile at them that someone had probably told him looked rakish and in actuality looked more like he was suffering through the preliminary stages of heatstroke.

Momokan leaned back on the heels of her hands. From where they stood at their booth she could see bags of cranes hung up around the gym to signal the start of the fall tournament for many teams—Tosei’s tastefully multicolored ones, Sakitama’s yellow and black honeybee pattern, the hosting Municipal’s ostentatious white and violet, all strung up around the gymnasium in a glittering array of possibilities utterly dwarfing the Nishiura orange and white, which hung in her office looked chipper, the colors of Koshien stadium. It was impossible to imagine what any of them might look like strung up next to their own, although logically she should be able to envision it. If she’d had a pair of perfectly-calibrated perfectly-cleaned binoculars that could pick out the specifics of Yoshida’s six tubes of medicated ointment, maybe she’d have taken a look—who knew, exactly.

“Abe-kun,” Shinooka was saying, without a trace of irony, “on the actual coach’s discussion forum, nobody talks about Yoshida-kun’s personal life.”

“What. _Why_.”

She cast a guilty glance at Momokan. “Well…not everyone can make use of it as well as our team can, I’m sure…or maybe they think it’s. You know, personal.”

Abe shook his head and, in his disdain, gave the peeled clementine to Momokan in what could have been a condemnatory gesture or a fit of misplaced chivalry; it was altogether impossible to tell. “Honestly,” he said, tightening his orange tie in a way that surely would have been intimidating, had the act of tightening a tie posed a threat to anyone but the wearer, “it’s like they don’t even _want_ to completely destroy anyone else’s morale in the most efficient possible—anyway, what I think, what I think is that if we spread out quickly, we could put brochures _inside_ other team’s brochures, so that when they pick them up, they’ll see ours the second they open—“

“That would defeat the purpose of having our own brochures,” said Shinooka, uncharacteristically curt. “And they’re nice brochures. Anyway, you didn’t make them, so—maybe you don’t know. But here they are, and if you want to get started, you can go and start handing them out.”

When he’d gone Shinooka sat behind the table, drawing into herself and folding her hands on the tablecloth, more fretful than Momokan had ever seen her. They looked at the booth, the helicopter whizzing about dragging the flag behind it, the clementines stacked neatly next to the photocopied brochures. The muted, photogenic Kasukabe players on the tablet enthusedly spearing litter—was the _trash_ purple?—and depositing it in K-emblazoned bags like some kind of mechatronic theme park exhibit.

She meant to ask if everything was all right, but instead she heard herself saying, “Quite a turnout, isn’t it!”

“It’s the prefectural recruitment fair,” said Shinooka dully. “I guess all the big schools are here.”

“We’ll have a fine turnout at our booth too,” said Momokan. “We placed in the best sixteen in the summer, we beat Tosei, and—we have a lovely booth! Just amazing.”

“Tajima-kun might have come too.”

“He’s got a lot on his mind. Senda next week, you know.”

“That’s right.” They looked out into the gymnasium, letting the echoes of WELCOME! from table to table ricochet past them as visitors began to trickle in. Any of them, Momokan thought. In a season, I could be shouting at any of them, fixing their stances, adjusting their grips. Threatening to bench them when I know I can’t. Changing their positions the week before we play the game that will probably knock us out of the running, and giving them a lot on their mind.

“I should go and say hello to other coaches,” she said, slipping off the table. Her thoughts felt unwieldy, far too clumsy and unresponsive where she could feel them vibrating tensely under cover of normal functioning, piano strings tucked out of the way under a glossy cover. “Are you going to be all right manning the table?”

“Yep,” said Shinooka.

When Momokan had gone up on a window-washing job after the Musashino game she’d been seized by the most terrible urge to let a ball drop from her harness onto the concrete below, despite the cars and pedestrians zipping back and forth across the line of the freeway under the skyscraper, doing up the landscape in little stitches. She’d looked at the ball in her hand, then down to the concrete. She’d looked at her reflection swaying gamely in the swath of neat, sudsy window she’d just swiped clean not a moment ago, cheeks still a little pink: she’d been thinking about the balls that had missed Haruna. The vertigo had subsided gradually but the urge to take the risk stayed. She’d let the feeling swing for a while inside her chest, next to her hammering heartbeat, and then she put the ball back in her pouch.

Looking back at Shinooka now she saw the smile crawl onto her face once, twice, and flicker off instantly. In the crush of frenetic activity she looked like a single festival lightbulb in a string of lights, struggling to ignite; she folded her hands again, refolded them. She must, thought Momokan, have looked like this as shortstop on her softball team, squinting at a grounder approaching her in the dirt. The minute focus, the fluttering adjustments. Finally the smile: smoothed on as pleasantly as ever. Momokan looked at it one last time, for fortification, then unclenched her hands on her skirt and made her way into the crowd.

 

 

 

 

~  

 

 

 

 

She remembered the incoherence of being seventeen: flicking an eraser accidentally into the collar of the girl in front of her, tapping her sneakers together under her desk like shrine clappers tossing prayers at the slowly ticking clock, shoulders freckled and tanned and stippled with goosebumps as the ceiling fan chopped air in the schoolroom, fingers scooping her long hair off her neck to let the soporific summer sunlight find her skin. The faux-infield they’d made with a chopped-up putting green looked swooningly inviting through the window, slashed by sprinklers they’d borrowed from the gardening club and set to run on it so it’d feel good to their bare feet when they ran out onto it (that, as the Intrepid Mountaineer said, was the kind of thing only a manager-turned-baseball-player could think of). Turning the career survey on her desk this way and that, trying to pretend the pristine white boxes meant something more immediate than that field of makeshift green.

“Momoe-chan, you should think seriously about what you want to do!”

That was teachers, that was parents. Sometimes that was the Intrepid Mountaineer too, who had already laid aside his part-time job money for the backpacking trip he would take before starting cram school, that she’d refused to sign on with, laughing, because—who wasted their summer (and longer—oh, if she’d known it would be much, much longer) on a place with _snow_? Unheard-of! Maybe he was the one who wasn’t serious! 

(“My dear Maria, we can’t do this forever. Consider, if you will—! We couldn’t even do it for three years.”

“Speak for yourself! _I_ learned how to pitch a screwball _,_ one _you_ still can’t hit! And I don't need you, you're the one who's running off to the mountains for--"

"Only a few _weeks_! You need people to play baseball, don't forget my face!")

How could they think she hadn’t thought seriously? She had the screwball to perfect, the proper twisting motion of her wrist. Her own training regimen to calibrate and test on the Intrepid Mountaineer; maybe they couldn’t go to Koshien or even a local tournament now, in their last year, but at least he could hit a home run, and she could prevent him from hitting one! Grounds to book, clubs to negotiate with for practice space. Sandlot teams to scour for a chance to play casually, and then winnow the list to ones that would let them play with a girl. 

She still had those brochures in her books and bags, scattered over the floor of her room with takeout menus and the numbers for used motorcycle dealerships. Thinking seriously! That was the only way to play baseball. That was the thing only the Intrepid Mountaineer knew too, and Chuman Kanae glaring angrily in the pamphlet, nothing if not serious: there was a little fear involved, with all the passion. You only did it if you _were_ scared, on some level. You only did it if you were afraid you’d never be able to love anything else, anything safer, quite like that ever again.

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

In theory, Momokan knew there was technically nothing about legacy schools that should be intimidating off the field, but the optimistic rush brought on by repetition of this fact was difficult to maintain when you did things like snag a purple kleenex from a dispenser to fix your makeup and read, blurred by bronzer, something like “Did you know that the 1997 fall season Municipal offense lineup was photographed in Love Berry’s photo spread of Japan’s most beautiful people?”

She made a compacted ball of the thing and launched it into a trash can with her best knuckle curve, despite the fact that designer kleenex (“Pick up a copy of the magazine and make sure to vote for your favorite nineties Municipal cleanup at our booth!” it had trilled on the back) weren’t conducive to breaking balls or apparently, really anything but attracting ludicrous throngs of people to the Kasukabe booth, which had been swallowed up by eager parents all evening, obscuring whatever act of grandiose pageantry they’d concocted for the evening that was giving Shinooka such an inferiority complex. She shrugged off a momentary haze of doubt and got into line for the out-of-prefecture stand, where two boys in sleek Namisato v-necks were shaking hands courteously and handing out pop-out pie charts in complimentary leatherette portfolios that probably could have furnished her bike maintenance for a year, at _least_. 

“Cheap,” she muttered.

The person in line behind her laughed. She winced and whirled around to find Tosei’s catcher captain covering his mouth with a legal pad. “Oh!” she said. “It’s you! Kawai-kun—“

“Ah—you’re Nishiura’s—I didn’t recognize you, pardon me! With the, um. Hair—“

“Yeah, pretty sure she was like, bald last time you saw her, you neglected to mention,” drawled the boy next to him, thrusting his hand out apparently attempting to gore Momokan in the stomach, which she sidestepped to repurpose as an innocuous handshake.

“Stop it, Roka-san, that’s _not_ what I—“

“Market research?” Roka was looking at Momokan’s empty tote bag. His own Bijou satchel was crammed with paperwork. “You look like you’re aiming high, kantoku-san. Maybe best eight next year?”

She remembered now—the assistant coach in the stands. “Maybe, Roka-san! You could give us tips, I’m on the lookout for a second-string catcher and I’ve heard yours bowed out.”

He narrowed his eyes. She imagined facing them down from across the mound, where you could see and remember faces most clearly: it was why she would never forget, not for a moment, the way the Intrepid Mountaineer had looked, tapping the toe of his wilderness boot on the home plate crate between classes, or her father, calling out reminders to fix her left-handed windup.   

Kazuki looked from Roka’s face to hers and dug into his own tote bag, coming out with an understated blue matte folder emblazoned with the same Tosei diamond that adorned their boxes of sweets. “Kantoku-san, take one of ours, too! Though I suppose it’s hardly necessary to give _you_ our data at this point, haha…”

“You’re such a _child_ , Kazuki,” said Roka in disgust, and bowed out of the line. They watched him shove his way past meandering families in his sharp suit, Italian leather shoes tooled in a jade green that matched the leatherwork on a heart-meltingly flash Ducati Momokan had seen parked outside, which she guessed was his and had reduced her usually sedate bike-sensitive nerve to a quivering antenna of envy. Some people had it all! paid for with black-market Namisato portfolios, no doubt.

“Please ignore him,” said Kazuki. “He’s been like that all day, he’s—just bitter because I wanted to stop at Kitamoto Nanryou’s booth over there, you see—“ he pointed in the general direction of a modest mint-green booth kitted out to look like a stadium ticket stand. “Anyway, kantoku-san—it’s…very nice to see you again.” He flushed and she stepped back; the sincerity in his voice had surprised them both. “First time at the prefectural recruitment fair?”

“That’s right! It’s, ah. It’s really something! Much bigger than we thought…I think our manager is quite overwhelmed.”

“Only the one came?”

“Oh, actually, um. We only have the one.”

“Oh! I didn’t mean—that’s my mistake, sorry.”

She fingered the matte Tosei folder. It would, she knew logically, contain the same data Shinooka had scoped from tapes and spent hours formatting; there was no reason for her to suddenly feel irritated, wishing she had the Xeroxed, handwritten copy Shinooka had spent all night preparing in her hands instead of this glib piece of public relations propaganda. “It’s no problem. If the team gets bigger, I’ll definitely want to find another!”

“You’re looking to replace your catcher?”

“Well—it would be nice to know I could. I replaced my cleanup last week.”

There: she’d said it out loud. Kazuki was frowning, trying to remember who Tajima was; she took one of the black-and-white, hand-stapled Nishiura brochures out of her tote bag and pointed from Tajima to Hanai. “Hmm,” he said, “it’s your right fielder! He’s taller, certainly. I’m sure he’s just as good.”

“He isn’t.” Kazuki didn’t react in the least. If he had, she’d have stopped talking. “But I don’t know how else to get him better.”

There was no reason to be telling any of this to a rival captain. She thought of Abe’s confusion in the parking lot, his inability to understand why no one on the team was speaking to him and her own inability to explain it, Shinooka’s hands folding and unfolding over their little table no one would visit. The chaos and cacophony of the gymnasium felt like a corporeal presence on her shoulders, left bare by the nice-occasion dress; she felt like a child at a party, watching its parents mingle with the sparkling guests. The thought exhausted her, made her teeter for a moment; she placed a tentative hand against Kazuki’s shoulder to steady herself.

“I’m sure you’ve made the decision with all the experience and knowledge at your disposal,” said Kazuki carefully.  

"There are—" Tajima's wide, wild eyes swam through her mind, the quick-step rage that had propelled him out onto the field at Musashino faster than she had, when the first pitch zoomed towards Haruna's chest. She'd been grateful then. She hadn't given a sign because she'd watched, for a shameful moment, but—he'd reacted without one. She pulled the thought through her fingers, thinking of crouching in the dirt checking a practice net for snags. "Do you ever think you don't have much to do with what they're doing? Not really, anyway."

"That you weren't as much of an influence on them as you'd have liked."

"I never even thought I'd want to be an  _influence_ on them—"

"No, well—I wasn't quite talking about you, I guess."

They waited quietly in the line, buffeted back and forth a little at a time, alone with their own thoughts in the crowd and this was what it was like, alone in the dugout, sending a sign out to be taken, or ignored, sending out hundreds of them. No one under any obligation. You weren't _owed_ obedience, certainly, particularly when you hadn't proven yourself. When this was how you were proving yourself.

"I guess I did want to think they'd do better under me than they would under anyone else," said Kazuki. "At least—by the end, I definitely hoped Ju—Tosei, all of them, would be a team that didn't underestimate anyone, and I couldn't even do that much."

“Does it say that in your folder, captain?”

He put his hand up and eased hers off his shoulder, gently; it was warm and calloused the way Abe’s was, in the same places, catchers’ bruises even through the reinforced mitt. Did Tosei sit in a meditation circle, with their dozens and dozens of players? Did they know what one another’s hands felt like?

“Ex-captain. And anyway—I’m no good for P.R., else I’d have told you personally after the summer what I thought of your game.”

“What did you think of our game?”

“That you can’t do everything yourself,” he said, “I know what that’s like, I—“ and then the people in front of them moved off and the Namisato boys were shaking their hands and giving them their folders, encouraging them to visit them in Kansai, exclaiming recognitions and pleasantries upon seeing Momokan’s face. Kazuki waited while she asked after their coach and scribbled Mihashi’s email on a notecard for Nagamiya Yuugo, who hadn’t come with them, and then bowed to her, holding it longer than he needed to. She thought about facing them in their dugout across the field, indistinct and unmemorable—as a coach, how could you remember faces? Though you needed to, perhaps more than anyone. She turned to go, her tote bag just that little bit heavier.

“Kantoku-san!” She turned around.

“What is it?”

Kazuki was smiling. He had _dimples_ , she realized—totally preposterous. He was waving a Tosei folder in the air. 

("My dear Maria! Don't forget my face!")

“You forgot to give me one of yours!”

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

“This is what the lineup is going to look like for Senda,” she’d said, and tacked the printout onto the door of her office. “Try to look one ahead, all of you. Think of the next practices as an audition for these positions, and if you like being where you are, try to keep it! And then—laps with tires, four each. Four _laps_ , not four _tires_ , Mizutani-kun—and if any of you have a problem, come see me afterwards.”

They’d clustered around it immediately and she’d ducked past them and gone into the office, one ear tuned to the burbles of conversation, shouts and whispers. Mihashi, always contentedly secure in his position, trundled out to start his laps without looking at the sheet at all. Her door was kicked half open and Nishihiro smiled bashfully at her through the gap as he checked for his name, still at the bottom of the list, and followed Mihashi out.

She’d lined up her colored highlighters, most of them promotional ones from suppliers she’d scoped out through cold calls. It was important to save these five or ten yen where you could. She did them in height order, then color order, then fineness of grade. The whispers and jostles outside the door continued. She snatched up an orange highlighter and disrupted the neat plane of order she’d made. Counted to five, then seven. Then the door slid all the way open and Tajima was there, the edges of his body punched out bruiselike by the sunlight.

She tapped the desk roughly with the orange highlighter. One of its fellows rolled off and clattered on the floor. She didn’t go for it and Tajima didn’t look at it, just curled his fingers around the edge of the door, precise and courteous in what he wanted, even when his energy was most apparent.

“Tajima-kun,“ she said. “Congratulations on five-hole. I’m sure you’ll live up to it when we play Senda. Any trouble?”

After he’d missed Junta’s sinker he’d stared at her the same way, livid and wide-eyed, only a child who expected nothing of her at all and this made his gaze as hard to meet as an infant’s, though the feeling welled there was so much more potent than innocence. It was, she realized dully, the same way when she gave signs. He didn’t shake them off because for him there was no need to acknowledge them at all.

What could a coach do, after all, for a student who didn’t need anything? Deprive him of something—what else? What more? Wasn't that logical? 

“Nah,” said Tajima eventually. He moved his hand from the door. The fingers were still curled, as though around the neck of a bat. “‘Course not. You said an audition, right.”

“That’s right.”

He didn’t return her smile. “I know this English word—understudy.”

“It’s one way of looking at it, certainly—“

“We haven’t learned it yet in the book, so if I wrote it on a test, maybe the teacher wouldn’t be—I guess you know what I mean.”

“Tajima-kun.”

He’d stepped back, as though momentarily appalled by his own transgression, except there wasn’t nearly enough surprise to warrant that. A minor mistake from someone who could afford to make them. She thought she could feel the sun on the back of his hair, droning the way she felt it on her cheeks as she held her own smile in place.

It wasn't the  _wrong_ decision, certainly, it was only that there was no way to forecast: to know with certainty if it was the right one.

“Yeah. Yeah. Anyway—thanks, Momokan!”

He’d lobbed a gallant bow in her general direction and loped out onto the field, where Izumi was waiting for him. The rest of the team had already congregated around Hanai, needling him about cleanup. Momokan watched Tajima skirt the cluster of kids and scoop up a tire. Weighting himself down. Even with it, he’d probably handle himself as fast as the others without. He did a gangling, teetering stretch as he adjusted it, getting ready to sprint, and then took off, pulling ahead of Mihashi and Nishihiro in moments.

She’d watched from her desk through the half-open door. She’d waited until he was halfway around the grounds, nowhere near able to look back, and then she got on her knees to look for the highlighter. It’d gone off somewhere; she couldn’t find it. Somehow it was difficult to focus her attention long enough to look. Within a few moments she accepted she’d already given it up for lost.

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

By the time she got back to their booth she was nursing the beginnings of an atrocious migraine and was dismayed to find that Abe and Shinooka had switched their duties, Shinooka had just stepped out to hand out brochures, and Abe was in medias heated conversation with a boy in one of the most horrible suits she had ever seen, replete with eighties shoulder pads and a Tokyo University tie clip which presumably expanded in direct proportion to the size of the wearer’s ego and inversely to his taste. She watched them for a few moments in apprehension, and then Yoshida turned around and spotted her. Abe said something angrily and pressed a brochure on him. He came forward to shake her hand.

“Congratulations on going to Koshien,” she said. This was muscle memory, this was one hundred fastballs on a bluely gleaming summer day, the Intrepid Mountaineer sloganeering brightly on the old Nishiura grounds. She could do this. “ARC is an inspiration for everyone in Saitama!”  

“Sure,” he said dismissively. “Well done with best—eight? Sixteen. Good showing. Should shape up to be a decent team in ten or fifteen years. Any promising players, consider investing in their future—let me give you my card.”

He gave her the card. As he did, he set the brochure Abe had given him back down on the table, and it was swept off by his sleeve. Abe, who was fixing the stack of them, flinched.

A wave of loathing washed over Momokan instantly, seemingly stemming from the points at her temples that were holding the migraine there _just_ so, the way the poor helicopter was teetering feebly through the air on its last dregs of battery life, dragging the flag. She took the card with the very tips of her fingers, as though it were diseased. 

“If you see Takahashi Kou,” she said, “please say hello. And congratulate him on his home run record for me.”

When he’d gone she went behind the table immediately and kicked off her heels, watching Abe hover with increased vigor, fixing the work Shinooka had done as easily as he’d upended it. He ducked under the table to fetch the brochure that Yoshida had dropped. She thought of Tajima staring at her after the sinker, Hanai’s anxious look over the tops of the other boys’ heads at the Koshien campground, Shinooka, the Intrepid Mountaineer, all these people facing her, and she still had no idea what to say, no idea at all. You couldn’t do everything yourself, but it was Nishiura, she did the grounds maintenance, she wrote signs, she’d ordered brochures all those years ago for an imaginary team that had never come into being and that she now had, against all hope, and how could she _not_ have hoped to be an influence? 

Any promising players, consider investing in their future.

“Abe-kun,” she said, “where’s Shinooka?” 

“I just took over for a little while,” he muttered.

“And where were you before that?”

“I went to ARC’s—“ 

“Why?”

He got up. He was holding the brochure, now dirtied; she thought about the Chuman Kanae pamphlets she’d purchased as a child, phoning in for them with such _utter certainty_ that the knowledge of what had been accomplished before, through nothing more than determination and a little bit of careful planning from a young mind and a young heart, could sway the minds of people who had everything at their disposal. 

“Momokan,“ Abe was saying, “I know it looks bad. But it’s because he was a great catcher that he was acting like that. We should learn from ARC. We—“

“He was walking all over you.”

He scowled. “You weren’t here.”

The migraine was getting worse. She took a clementine from the nearly untouched stash and began to peel it “I don’t need to have been here, Abe-kun. I think I’ve met more people in my life than you, I think I have a little more common sense, and I think I know how to look out for my own players when they’re in trouble.”

He looked cornered. There was so much bravado in him but he couldn’t do this; he wasn’t Tajima, dear to her and dear to his team for his fine, diamond-honed game sense, Abe knew only how to put one foot in front of the other, the way Momoe Maria had when she was fourteen and stupidly, _madly_ in love with her green infield and everything she had planned that was going to happen on it. “You don’t—you’re _not_ thinking ahead, Momokan—it takes a certain kind of understanding—“ 

“Like the understanding that lead you to throw those close pitches at Haruna Motoki on _purpose_ to exploit the fact that a _player who has gone through_ _rehabilitation_ would naturally be frightened of injury? Is that what you’re talking about, Abe-kun? Because that’s correct, I didn’t think ahead—if I had, I’d have benched you during that game itself, and then I’d like to know what Yoshida-kun—“

“You _wouldn’t_! You wouldn’t have benched me! Because you wouldn’t have been willing to _lose_!” 

She stepped back. Kicking one of her shoes aside. You couldn’t do everything yourself, said Kawai Kazuki, and what did he know? What _could_ he know? because there were hundreds of people available to man Tosei’s booth, and ARC’s, and Kasukabe’s, there were hundreds of people there to replace him when he couldn’t play, there were hundreds of people to comfort him after his summer had ended, and she had—she had— 

Her hand landed on her bag. She dug into it and found her change purse, then tossed it to him.

“Go home,” she said.

“What?”

“Hail a cab. Go home. I didn’t do it then, and now you’re not going to believe I will if ever say it again, so—go home. Shinooka and I will take the bike.”

“Momokan—“

“You’re right. I’m going to do it my way or I’m not going to do it. Go home.”

He caught the purse. Of course he did. Her one and only starting catcher. Out in the gymnasium, the lights dimmed for Kasukabe Municipal’s lightshow, spangling the walls with purple and white, and she felt alone in the dark, as though in a tunnel, her own thoughts ricocheting off the walls of her mind, expanding to fill the empty space.

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

A week after the Intrepid Mountaineer died her father had come outside to watch her throw in her backyard, neglecting the career survey she now didn’t want to look at, not ever again, chased outdoors by the abhorrent, misplaced loveliness of the mellow summer night. “You’ve never played in an official game before,” he said, “don’t you think that’s going to give you trouble if anyone finds out?”

She had thrown an absolute scorcher of a screwball. If the ball were larger, it could have taken the leaves off the tree, singed the twigs and branches where it landed and scoured a depression into the soil that smudged her sneakers, dredged up a tornado that could have reached all the way to the sky, a natural disaster of the sort she’d _created_ and that didn’t just—happen to people, happen to people you loved out on the mountains, before they’d hit their first homerun off your absolute! _scorcher_! of a screwball. But it wasn’t larger, it was only what it was, and it fit in the palm of her hand.

She said, “No reason for it to come up.”

"Don't answer the question if you don't know the answer. You’re a fool if you think that. It will make it difficult for teammates to take you seriously.”

“Then I guess it’s good I don’t have a teammate anymore,” she said.

She’d lobbed the ball, less precise, clicked her tongue, fixed her stance, set her shoulders, banished the dull pain under her breastbone to the tips of her fingers and threw it again. A fool, said the undamaged tree, the pristine soil of the backyard where she’d grown up. A fool, said the heavy plum-colored sky. She jogged out and made a tally mark with chalk for where the ball had landed: this was experience.

Her father stood watching her, hands in his pockets. No umpire in the country could make better calls. The knowledge of what the world was like now didn’t dissipate, but it didn’t worsen. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. It was such a beautiful night. It had been such a good pitch. It would have been such a good homerun. She scooped up the ball. She threw again.

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

When Shinooka got back the lightshow was in full swing, spangling the entire gymnasium with gigantic swathes of color, and Momokan was sitting with her knees pulled up on the folding chair, watching it in silence. Shinooka pulled out the chair next to her and took a seat. They sat there together in the dark. It was like an aquarium: everything washed out in the hue of the ones who were at home there. The submarinean coalescence of the light on the walls overpowered the colors of everything else.

“Did Abe-kun—“

“I told him to go home. This is—about projecting an image for Nishiura, I don’t think he understood what that meant.”

Over the months they’d been together Momokan had learned about Shinooka that she looked like she could be startled by anything, and she often was: the wrong drink from the vending machine, an unusually raucous compliment from one of the boys—these things were always Shiga’s snake in the grass to her, an absolute horror of small myriad unknowns. But in larger moments she had a stillness to her and that stillness was what she wrapped herself in now, fidgeting nervously with one pigtail as she looked out into the darkened gym. One leg and its besocked foot wrapped around the folding chair, anchoring her to Nishiura’s table. It was easy to imagine what her middle school coach must have seen in her when she was chosen to play shortstop. Momokan could see her easily, skating across the little rill of dirt between second and short, covering the base with that same merry stillness.

“He disagreed with Yoshida-san that he should send his ace over to a better school if he thought he was talented,” said Shinooka. “That was what the argument was about. I heard the beginning of it.”

“Abe-kun said that?”

“Well, it’s—not something he hasn’t said before,” said Shinooka, and put her hands in her lap. Her eyes looked considering and bright; Momokan thought of Tajima’s thoughtful stare, his immediate foreknowledge of what needed to be done. Shinooka’s hands went up around her neck, reaching under the collar of her cardigan. Momokan thought she was taking it off, but she was actually detaching something, a necklace, a—collar. She got up and came around the folding chair, and lifted Momokan’s hair out of the way. 

When the collar touched her neck she felt tears in her eyes, and ducked her head. Shinooka’s hands were deft and quick, fastening it securely, and then her arms came around her, and she buried her face in her shoulder.

“You wore your Kasukabe uniform collar.”

“We’re from Nishiura,” said Shinooka, into Momokan’s neck. Momokan put her hand over her wrist, felt the little fluttering pulse. How much it meant—how much it was—simply to be out on the field, the adrenaline there an embodied pulse of the world, a constant affirmation of the simplest and most wonderful sensation possible: that you and the ones in your care were alive. “It can be anything we want.”

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

The first time she had ever found Abe in her office he’d been skulking around with a logbook and a computer, doing something with hitting data from the newcomers’ tournament in a strange-looking spreadsheet program by the blue glow of his computer screen. She’d been walking outside in the chilly grounds, thinking, after having seen them off to the batting cages, the bonfire done for hours and light pockets of ash on the ground that she’d raked away on her way back to the office. When she snapped the tubelight on Abe yelped and jumped about two meters, then hissed and clapped a hand to his bandaged knee. “You should knock,” he’d said accusingly, as if she hadn’t just caught him in _her own office_ after hours getting cozy with her databooks.

“ _You_ should—“ There was no way to even make a dent in the mass of things he should be doing. “Didn’t you go to the batting center? I thought I’d told all of you—”

“I went! Hanai should do all right in front of Haruna, if that’s what you wanted me to check.” She tensed, wondering suddenly just how obvious it’d been, but he only waved a hand dismissively. Tajima hadn’t seemed to be on his mind at all—but then, that was the difference between a player and a coach. “I thought the high-velocity pitching machine could intimidate Mihashi, or give him _ideas,_ so I was watching him from a safe distance—then Nishihiro downloaded this program for me and told me my time would be better spent putting data in it, so I did, and then I thought it was only eleven-thirty, so I could come here and finish if Shinooka gave me the key. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this about batting cages, but they’re so—there are so many _batters_ there.” Momokan made a mental note to exempt Nishihiro from grounds maintenance for the next—maybe ten years or so, and possibly send him gardenias. “Anyway, as you can see, I’ve been forecasting an interesting lineup for the Musashino game.”

“What did you think of the school bonfire?”

He looked at her blankly. “I’ve been forecasting an interesting lineup for the Musashino game.”

She smiled ruefully and went to look over his shoulder, where the data had been sorted into a matrix, and he was running correlations with different combinations of runners and hitters. It was a surprisingly good analysis for a high school student, cross-referenced with fifty-meter dash times and field baserunning times he must have taken over different practices. “I got the idea from Shinooka,” he said, “she keeps a record of this.”

“Why don’t you walk me through it?”

She half expected him to say it was late, but he only put the computer on the desk and kicked the net chair into place to let her see the screen. A few moths skittered around the notebooks, drawn to the data on the screen, and Abe batted them away with a careless hand, ever disdainful of incidentals. It became apparent in moments that most of what he was suggesting was pure mathematical wishful thinking: perfect-world simulations of fantasy baseball. Optimal baseline conditions. Nothing would get away from you, you would always have the amount of people you needed. No one would leave. No one would, say, going completely out on a limb, _die_ on you. Or anything.

She pulled a braid over her shoulder and began to worry at the tip of it, watching the numbers on the screen resolve themselves into a model lineup, that wouldn’t work because it wasn’t a model world. But he had no way of knowing that yet.

It’s not going to work, she thought she said. Instead, she heard herself saying, “Maybe next time. We’ll need to teach a few more signs.”

“Signs. Yes. Excellent.”

Eleven-forty-seven. There was time. “Get me that sketchpad, Abe-kun! We’ll—figure something out.”

To be a high school student—incredible. She was fourteen again, stacking her pamphlets on the desk, listening to moths on the tubelight that sounded like the volleys of rain on that auditorium roof. Forming the idea, under her finger skimming a line down the sign-up sheet, of her first screwball, the Intrepid Mountaineer’s first good hit off it that they’d celebrate with apple ices at the summer festival. There was something about the way singlemindedness didn’t change though everything else might have, it was only translated, filtered through the prisms of different experiences, myriad ways to express the same sentiment. Projections worked. Summer lasted. 

It could be anything you wanted. No way of knowing.

 

 

 

 

~

 

  

 

When they got outside Abe was glowering around her bike, bashing her purse miserably against his knees. He’d pulled the collar of his blazer up and forgotten his jacket—Momokan had as well, but Shinooka had grabbed it. She tossed it to him. He stared at it with such horror he didn’t catch it, and this was ultimately what allowed Momokan to bridge the little remaining distance between them, and take a seat on the bike next to him. 

“Did you leave the table unmanned,” he said.

“Someone’s probably going to eat our clementines,” said Shinooka clearly. “It’s all right, though, I wrote our website on them in permanent marker.”

“That’s ingenious.” He frowned. “We don’t have a website.”

“I can make a page if we go home early,” she insisted, and then admitted, “I just wanted to write something with the purple marker I got from the Kasukabe booth.”

The three of them hid their smiles. The wind whipped around them, a little colder now than it had been at Musashino, a lot colder than it had been at Bijou, and this was how the years would go by. Momokan wanted to throw her own jacket over both their shoulders, but without her having to do anything they pulled their own sleeves down, groped in pockets for gloves, cared for themselves absently as they wandered through the thickets of their own individual thoughts. 

“I think going home early sounds like a good idea,” said Momokan. “If I have to hear one more thing about Kasukabe Municipal's unique personal element...”

Abe’s cheeks were blotchy. Momokan ignored them and dangled a jade-green keychain in front of him. “Look, Roka-san even lent me his keys to come get you! Can you imagine joyriding into Misae-san’s driveway on a _Ducati_ —anyway, we’ll do it when we go to Bijou for a practice.”

“When we do _what_?”

“We lost to them,” she said. “I think you’re right, you know, Abe-kun—we should be learning. But you know—we can choose how we want to do that, too.”

“I suggested Tosei again,” said Shinooka. “Did you know that Roka-san’s _brother_ is the—”

“All in good time,” said Momokan. “Anyway—Shinooka-chan, you want to do the honor of telling Shiba Yuuki we’re skipping out on this esteemed event early? Abe-kun and I will be in in a moment.” 

They watched her go, unzipping her jacket as she went to show off her outfit. They were the only school there who hadn’t needed uniforms, and she deserved it.

The metal of Momokan’s bike was cool under her fingers: Abe hadn’t hailed a cab after all, had only been waiting for them to come back out.

"Some night, huh," she said.

He made a noncommittal noise and dug his fingernail sulkily into the seam of her bike's seat. She watched this act of contemplative vandalism with dismay until he finally said, "I didn't expect _you_ to be weirded out. By the, um—" 

"Kleenex?"

"It was an off-brand, I think I have allergies to it," he muttered, swiping ferociously at his blotchy face. "Yeah, definitely, the um, kleenex. It's sinister. I've been doing some research into Kasukabe's booster club and its possible yakuza affiliations."

"I'm not a positivity machine, Abe-kun. It intimidates me too."

He glared at her. "What does positivity have to do with anything? ARC—Yoshida-san doesn't—"

"Well, we're not ARC! And you're not Yoshida-san! Thank goodness, I think." 

He had the grace to go silent. A few schools were coming outside now, carrying trophies and display cases in wagons or in bike sidecars. She'd seen Namisato boys running a relay from the parking lot to the gymnasium doors to help them carry things. Outside in the night, under the streetlights, school colors were washed out to a light, pensive grey.

"Do you really believe it?" Abe said suddenly. "That the only difference is practice time. Between us and—all of them."

Here it was, then: the moment you attempted to forestall, when they demanded an answer of you. Momoe-chan, you should think seriously, she thought, and in her mind she was still turning the career survey over, the same motion flicking the lineup page back and forth from Tajima's name, and that right choice still evaded her. She hunched her shoulders, shaking off a shiver of goosebumps. The night curled dense around her, like a single calligraphed stroke, syncing with the breaths she took. It wasn't quite like any other sport, baseball. What a meditative air it had after all.

"Do you really believe Mihashi-kun can do better with you than he would with any other catcher in Saitama?"

A month ago, he would have said yes without a doubt. Now he looked down at his knee, at the purse she'd tossed to him. 

“Don't answer the question if you don't know the answer," she said. “I'm not—willing to lose, you're still right. And I’m not sending my most promising players _anywhere,_ so long as we—so long as I can see improvement.”

Abe didn’t say anything. After a while he hopped off the bike, wiping his cheeks with the heel of his gloved hands. Momokan dug in her pocket and handed him Yoshida’s card. When it crumpled in his fist it had a finality to it. It was fitting that they were outside, where you would let off a firecracker with the same finality. There was a little of the old doubt there still, but it was like the coin at the bottom of a wishing-well pool, something seared with the fall wind and shimmering with promise under her breastbone. That was the feeling she'd had when she'd said it: a baseball kingdom on a mountaintop.

“Senda, then,” said Abe. “I’ve been thinking—“

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

The sun was in her eyes. They had only done half the grounds, the rest was still clotted with weeds, but she was fourteen, the Intrepid Mountaineer had put on his new batting helmet for the first time, and when he swung the aluminum bat it made a whistle like putting your lips to a glass bottle and blowing. Playing with the sweetness because you could afford to delay the start of summer, the first of the many they’d surely have before they grew up and he became a world-famous mountaineer who threw a ceremonial pitch on Kilimanjaro and she became—it wasn’t important to think about it, not now, not yet. She threw her rake in the dirt and snatched up her glove and a ball as she loped out to join him. 

(“My dear Maria! Where's the mound?”

“I’m the pitcher—it’s wherever I want it to be!”)

She wound up. Twisted her wrist to throw her new screw. The Intrepid Mountaineer was laughing at her from out in the makeshift batter’s box, his eyes alight with excitement. She would never forget him now, or these grounds, or the way this sensation felt. Not after she threw the first pitch.

(“If you want this team to have a good cleanup, you should want me to hit, and if you want it to have a good pitcher, you should want me to miss! So which is it, anyway?”

“Well—that's not an important question, you know—either way…I don't lose!”)

He put his bat down and whistled for her properly, two fingers and a piercing keen of celebratory noise, because they didn’t have an oendan yet. But they would. They would. That was just like him in the meantime, to think he could do everything himself. She looked at him, at a batter facing her as a pitcher for the very first time on a high school baseball field, and smiled. She felt the ball leave her fingers. She waited for whatever came.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  _the end_

 

 

 

 


End file.
